Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights [Paperback]

Lyndsey Stonebridge presents a new way to think about the relationship between literature and human rights that challenges the idea that empathy inspires action.A bold and accessible argument for the moral and political value of literature in rightless times.The obvious humanity of books would seem to make literature and human rights natural allies. But what is the real connection between literature and human rights? In this short polemical book, Lyndsey Stonebridge shows how the history of human rights owes much to the creative imagining of writers. Yet, she argues, it is not enough to claim that literature is the empathetic wing of the human rights movement. At a time when human rights are so blatantly under attack, the writers we need how are the political truthtellers, the bold callers out of easy sympathy and comfortable platitudes.1. Introduction: Literature in the Endtimes (?) of Human Rights2. Once More with Feeling3. Experimental Human Rights: Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas4. Words of Fire: Creative Citizenship5. The Bewilderment of Everyday Violence: Shamima Begum, Freud, Citizenship and Law6. Survival Time/Human Time: Hannah Arendt and Behrouz Boochani7. Conclusion: Hannah Arendt in BaddawiLyndsey Stonebridge,Professor of Humanities and Human Rights, University of BirminghamLyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at University of Birmingham. Her books include:The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg(2011/2014), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize,The Destructive Element(1998),Reading Melanie Klein(with John Phillips, 1998),The Writing of Anxiety(2007), andBritish Fiction after Modernism(with Marina MacKay, 2007). She is currently collaborating on a large interdisciplinary project, Refugee Hosts.